Robot Saints

City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works Publications and Research New York City College of Technology 2015 Robot Saints Christopher B. Swift CUNY New York City College of Technology How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/ny_pubs/171 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] robot saints Christopher Swift abstract In the Middle Ages, articulating religious fgures like wooden Deposition crucifxes and ambu- latory saints were tools for devotion, techno-mythological objects that distilled the wonders of engineering and holiness. Robots are gestures toward immortality, created in the face of the undeniable fact and experience of the ongoing decay of our feshy bodies. Both like and unlike human beings, robots and androids occupy a nebulous perceptual realm between life and death, animation and inanimation. Masahiro Mori called this in-between space the “uncanny valley.” In this essay I argue that unlike a modern person apprehending an android (the uncanny humanlike object that resides in the space between what is essentially human and what is essentially not human), the physical animation of late medieval devotional objects fulflled the expectations of their puppeteers and audiences to move. Glittering precious metals and stones, liturgical music, and other environmental properties of the sanctuary materially inferred the presence and action of saints on earth, greatly enhancing the afective lives of devotees. I focus on later medieval Spanish statues of the Virgin in order to transcend their familiar aesthetic and religious interpretations of anthropomorphic statues, and explore instead their functional aspects and performative relationships between ritual objects and their users. keywords automata; articulated sculpture; uncanny; performance; Virgin Mary In 1248, King Fernando III entered the defeated Islamic city of Seville, carrying in his triumphal procession the wooden Virgen de los Reyes, an ensemble of the articulating statues of Virgin and Child that is perhaps the earliest extant humanoid automata in western Europe.1 Subsequently owned by Fernando’s son, King Alfonso X “the Wise,” the statues articulated at the shoulders, elbows, hips, knees, and necks.2 Sometime during the Baroque era their heads were anchored to their torsos with metal clasps, and the now-static mechanized fgures have resided since behind the altar of the capilla real of the Seville cathedral (Fig. 1). preternature, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2015 Copyright © 2015 Te Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pa. PN 4.1_04_Swift.indd 52 23/02/15 7:51 PM christopher swift 53 fig. 1 La Virgen de los Reyes, thirteenth century. Wood, leather, copper, gold, sheepskin. Cathedral of Seville. Photo: Christopher Swift. Firsts in anything are remarkable, but my interest in this particular performance object was piqued when I stumbled on archival photographs showing the holes in the back of the two automata (Fig. 2). Before recognizing the technological distinctiveness of the objects, I experienced something much more visceral: an acute sense of the uncanny set of by simultaneous feelings of shame (for gazing at a sacred statue in a state of undress) and revulsion caused by the sight of the disembodied, emptied midsections of the wooden fgures. Freud wrote that dismembered limbs and feet that danced by themselves possessed an uncanny presence, or induced an uncanny response, especially when articulating body parts are perceived to be capable of independent activity.3 “Autonomous” androids—robots—occupy a nebulous perceptual realm between life and death, animation and stillness; Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori called this between space the “uncanny valley” that conditions our responses especially to anthropomorphic automata.4 My uncanny response to the Virgen de los Reyes resulted from the dissonant simultaneity of vitality and bloodlessness, a technological fantasy that inferred and disclosed the machine beneath my own skin. It seems unlikely, however, that the design concept behind animated devotional objects in the late medieval period would be to produce a sense of PN 4.1_04_Swift.indd 53 23/02/15 7:51 PM 54 preternature figs. 2a–b La Virgen de los Reyes. Rear view of internal mechanism. From José Hernández Díaz, Iconografa Medieval de la Madre de Dios en el Antiguo Reino de Sevilla (Seville: Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, 1971), plate II. uncanny revulsion. Perhaps there is something radically diferent in the way modern spectators experience androids and medieval devotees responded to Virgin Mary robots. Tis essay presents three analytical models for thinking about this diference. Applying recent work in developmental neuroscience to the concept of the uncanny suggests that, far from violating ontological dif- ferences, sanctioned disruptions of intuitive domains in religious settings may produce a sense of spiritual excitement. Second, in order to dispel the over- whelming and immediate skepticism about manifestations and incarnations of religious fgures and signs, it will be important to understand premodern response to sensually enigmatic objects. All types of matter were fertile and agentive in premodernity.5 If we frame the sacred robots within the specifc devotional experience of materiality in late medieval Europe, a diferent inter- pretation emerges: due to the absence of scientifc or ontological certitude about technological and biological diferences in the medieval period, beholders may not have perceived the moving statues as in any way uncanny. Finally, I theorize the phenomenology of the object within the microcosmic theatrical world of the royal chapels of Castilian monarchs. By foregrounding mechanical chore- ography and labor I show how medieval androids were employed to accomplish PN 4.1_04_Swift.indd 54 23/02/15 7:51 PM christopher swift 55 tasks, and in this way the objects performed theatrically and efcaciously. As defned by Jon McKenzie, “technological performances” straddle ludic and pro- ductive realms where both work and play are measured in terms of efcacy and efciency.6 Humanoid performance objects—including puppets, robots, and dolls—can act in predictably human ways, and around the rough edges that delineate humans from dolls (joint/hinge, limb/prosthetic, coronary artery/ pneumatic valve) the suggestion of life lingers. It is in this setting that technological and devotional pleasures merge in the presence of the robot saint. Automata are capable of independent movement; their locomotion derives from steam, water, or the latent energy held in a winding mechanism like a clock or the tongue-and-groove ratchet system of the Virgen de los Reyes androids. Tey function diferently from puppets, and are therefore perceived and experienced diferently as well.7 A few medieval examples are illustrative. Deposition crucifxes—explored, along with other articulating fgures of Christ, by Kamil Kopania in his contribution to this volume—are essentially puppets.8 Jointed wooden Christ fgures hung from the cross, and were removed and carried to a sepulcher during the Holy Friday liturgy. Te puppeteers, the agents of movement, were visible to the audience: priests or laypeople reenacted scenes from the Bible, performing the roles Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus in the Deposition of Christ. Te thirteenth-century El Cristo de los Gascones (Fig. 3), preserved in the Church of San Justo in Segovia, articulates at the elbows, shoulders, and hips, and is the oldest extant Deposition crucifx on the Iberian fig. 3 El Cristo de los Gascones, thirteenth century. Painted wood. Segovia. Photo: Christopher Swift. PN 4.1_04_Swift.indd 55 23/02/15 7:51 PM 56 preternature Peninsula. A palimpsest of approximately eight hundred years of performance history, the fgure’s current appearance is the result of multiple restorations made necessary by continuous ceremonial use.9 Te gauge of the automaton’s attention-grabbing power lies in its ability to labor independently while mimicking biological realism, often catching the beholder’s interest by an unsettling resemblance to humans. We are used to thinking about the eighteenth century as the golden age of the automata, when clock-makers, engineers, toy-makers, and inventors devised “sublime toys” that could talk, sing, write, and play chess.10 Mechanized human fgures were of particular interest to avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century as well, sparked by a double reaction of fascination and shock about the industrial- ized body of workers. Indeed, the word “robot” comes from robota (the Czech word for “work”), used by the playwright Karel Čapek in his Rostrom’s Universal Robots that describes automatons fghting humans for world domination.11 In Čapek’s times, the artifcial robot and concept of the body/machine met the challenge of industrial automation with a utopian incarnation of something more perfect than a human—a vision of a person. Yet, before robots became high-performance machines of mass production, automated statues in medieval Christian life were devotional tools, the distillation of technical processes and sacredness. Although St. Augustine’s writings on the dangers of sight and dramatic mimesis to corrupt faith are layered with images of corrupted bodies,12 and, to quote Caroline Walker Bynum, “anxiety about the threat of mutatio” of matter

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